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Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan
Those are fair points; and they serve to emphasize that the Harper government is developing policies in response to the wrong problem.
It's sort of akin to a person who discovers that the bucket he put under the hole in his leaky roof is full of water: his problem isn't "I need more buckets"--it's "I need to fix the roof."
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Your analogy is faulty.
The problem they are attempting to solve is not the problem of prison populations. They are attempting to address the perception, right or wrong, that criminals in Canada get off easy and are thus intentionally attempting to incarcerate more criminals for longer sentences. This has led to an increase in the incarceration rate, an increase in the number of prisoners and has created a need for more prisons.
It's all too easy to take the "falling crime rate" bait and take that to mean that with current laws and population growth rates, this will not lead to more prisoners and thus a need for more prisons. You may think that the root cause of the government's prison-building policy is bad policy and if you do I invite you to make that point but it's fallacious to attack it by using statistics out of context, as the federal opposition has done.